Monday, May 31, 2010

05/31/2010
The economy is booming and there is no other person to credit it to other than Gloria and her policies focused on the economy.

This is of course another Palace line and such a predictable line that most Filipinos saw coming the moment the National Statistics Office announced a 7.3 percent growth rate in the first quarter.

The growth push is as predictable as the Palace mouthpieces of Gloria, however. Money funneled into the economy by politicians itching for a government seat and recover what they had spent and maybe even earn a rich profit in the process, was the main source of the gross domestic product (GDP) expansion during the period.

It was practically all election money and the ever reliable remittances from Filipinos working abroad that were responsible for what the Palace has been trumpeting as Gloria’s crowning glory prior to her stepping down on June 30.

Manufacturing temporarily rose out of a slump as a result of the election campaign period where the many paraphernalia that defaced the city for nearly a year were churned out by factories. Services, mainly fastfood businesses, also benefited from the election windfall.

UP School of Economics professor Benjamin Diokno also cited the government’s rush to complete the so-called State of the Nation Address projects, which are major infrastructure projects which Gloria had listed in her 2006 Sona to support her Strong Republic thrust, as another source of growth.

For the nine years under Gloria, the economy had undergone a roller-coaster ride but as Gloria would say, it never went into a contraction. Of course, there were times when suspicions arose that some tweaking was being done with the statistics when growth would show a growth of less than one percent to avoid a technical recession.

For now the most stable source of economic output is the money being sent home by Filipino diaspora, which if seen in a different light, is labor resources sapped out of the economy.

The Palace has been bragging about Gloria’s policies centered on the economy that has been responsible for the strong growth in the quarter but the challenge would be for anybody in Gloria’s stable to name at least two defining policies of the supposed Glorianomics..... MORE